An epitome of an image is its condensed representation containing the essence of the textural and structure properties of the image. The epitome approach aims at reducing redundant information (texture) in the image by exploiting repeated content within an image.
It is known to factor an image into a texture epitome E and a transform map φ. The epitome principle was first disclosed by Hoppe et al in the article entitled “Factoring Repeated Content Within and Among Images” published in the proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 (ACM Transaction on Graphics, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 1-10, 2008). FIG. 1 illustrates the method of Hoppe. From an image Y, a texture epitome E and a transform map φ are created such that all image blocks of Y can be reconstructed from matched epitome patches of E. A matched patch is also known as transformed patch. Once the self similarity content is determined in image Y, the method of Hoppe extracts redundant texture patches to construct epitome charts, the union of all epitome charts constituting the texture epitome E. Each epitome chart represents repeated regions in the image. The construction of an epitome chart is composed of a chart initialization step followed by several chart extension steps. The transform map φ is an assignation map that keeps track of the correspondences between each block of the current image Icurr and a texture patch of the texture epitome E. The transform map is also known as vector map or assignment map in the literature. With the texture epitome E and the transform map φ, one is able to reconstruct the image I′. In the following the epitome designates both the texture epitome E and the transform map φ.